(217c) Transport Lite: Teaching Transport Phenomena through Application-Driven Inquiry in the Brewing Process

Transport Phenomena, CHE-5132 at Villanova University has historically been an upper-level elective designed for students who have an interest in advanced study in the discipline, taught in the spirit of Bird, Stewart and Lightfootâ??s seminal text of the same name. The fraction of students taking the course for its stated objectives is small. Rather, students often take the course for other reasons: its offered at a convenient time, they need a CHE elective, or are blocked out of other classes. In this talk, the author will describe how he abandoned the traditional approach, and adopted an applications-based approach. Students are introduced to the brewing process in some detail. The principles of transport phenomena are introduced as needed to build a deeper understanding of selected operations in the brewing process; for example, we consider diffusion of CO₂ and O₂ in a bed of malting barley, enzyme diffusion during mashing, flow through a packed bed during sparging, and heat transfer during the wort boil. Metrics comparing the two approaches are thin, but student feed back to the revised offering will be discussed.